karma

Feature overview

Alertmanager UI is useful for browsing alerts and managing silences, but it’s
lacking as a dashboard tool - karma aims to fill this gap.

Alert aggregation and deduplication

Starting with the 0.7.0 release it can aggregate alerts from multiple
Alertmanager instances, running either in HA mode or separate. Unique alerts are
displayed by filtering duplicates. Each alert is tagged with the names of all
Alertmanager instances it was found at and can be filtered based on those tags
(@alertmanager). Note that @alertmanager tags will be visible only if karma
is configured with multiple Alertmanager instances.

Alert visualization

Alerts are displayed grouped preserving
group_by
configuration option in Alertmanager. If a group contains multiple alerts only
the first few alerts will be presented. Alerts are expanded or hidden
using - / + buttons. The default number of alerts can be configured in the UI
settings module.
Each group can be collapsed to only show the title bar using top right toggle
icon.
Each individual alert will show unique labels and annotations. Labels
and annotations that are shared between all alerts are moved to the footer.

If all alerts in a group were suppressed by the same silence then, to save
screen space, the silence will also be moved to the footer.

Label based multi-grid

To help separate alerts from different environments or with different level of
severity multi-grid mode can be enabled, which adds another layer of visually
grouping alert groups.
To enable this mode go to the configuration modal and select a label name, all
alerts will be grouped by that label, each label value will have a dedicated
grid, including an extra grid for alerts without that label present.

Silence management

Silence modal allows to create new silences and manage all silences already
present in Alertmanager.
Silence ACL rules can be used to control silence creation and editing, see
ACLs docs for more details.

Alert overview

Clicking on the alert counter in the top left corner will open the overview
modal, which allows to quickly get an overview of the top label values for
all current alerts.

Alert acknowledgement

Starting with v0.50 karma can create short lived silences to acknowledge
alerts with a single button click. To create silences that will resolve itself
only after all alerts are resolved you can use
kthxbye.
See configuration docs for
details.

Dark mode

Starting with v0.52 release karma includes both light and dark themes.
By default it will follow browser preference using
prefers-color-scheme
media queries.

Demo

Online demo is running latest master branch
or PR branch version. It might include features that are experimental and not
yet ready to be included.

Release notes

To get notifications about new karma releases go to
GitHub karma page, click Watch and
select Releases only. This requires GitHub user account.
To subscribe to email notifications without GitHub account you can subscribe to
the RSS feed that
GitHub provides.
To get email notifications from those feeds use one of the free services
providing RSS to email notifications, like
Blogtrottr.

History

I created karma while working for Cloudflare,
originally it was called unsee.
This project is based on that code but the UI part was rewritten from scratch
using React. New UI required changes to the backend so
the API is also incompatible.
Given that the React rewrite resulted in roughly 50% of new code and to avoid
confusion for user I’ve decided to rename it to karma, especially that the
original project wasn’t being maintained anymore.

Supported Alertmanager versions

Alertmanager’s API isn’t stable yet and can change between releases, see
VERSIONS in internal/mock/Makefile for list of all
Alertmanager releases that are tested and supported by karma.
Due to API differences between those releases some features will work
differently or be missing, it’s recommended to use the latest supported
Alertmanager version.

Security

karma doesn’t in any way alter alerts in any Alertmanager instance it collects
data from. This is true for both the backend and the web UI.
The web UI allows to manage silences by sending requests to Alertmanager
instances, this can be done directly (browser to Alertmanager API) or by
proxying such requests via karma backend (browser to karma backend to
Alertmanager API) if proxy mode is enabled in karma config.

If you wish to deploy karma as a read-only tool without giving users any ability
to modify data in Alertmanager instance, then please ensure that:

the karma process is able to connect to the Alertmanager API

read-only users are able to connect to the karma web interface

read-only users are NOT able to connect to the Alertmanager API

readonly is set to true in
alertmanager:servers config section
for all alertmanager instances, this options will disable any UI elements that
could trigger updates (like silence management)

To restrict some users from creating silences or enforce some matcher rules use
silence ACL rules. This feature requires proxy to be enabled.

Metrics

karma process metrics are accessible under /metrics path by default.
If you set the --listen.prefix option a path relative to it will be
used.

Note that building locally from sources requires Go, nodejs and yarn.
See Docker build options below for instructions on building from withing docker
container.

Running

karma can be configured using config file, command line flags or environment
variables. Config file is the recommended method, it’s also the only way to
configure karma to use multiple Alertmanager servers for collecting alerts.
To run karma with a single Alertmanager server set ALERTMANAGER_URI
environment variable or pass --alertmanger.uri flag on the command line, with
Alertmanager URI as argument, example: